The Flight Dynamics and Control Toolbox

The Flight Dynamics and Control (FDC) toolbox for Matlab and Simulink provides flexible models and tools for flight simulation, flight dynamics analysis, and flight control system design. The main purpose of the toolbox is to illustrate how the flight control system design process can be simplified by integrating linear design methods (via Matlab control system design toolboxes) and non-linear system analysis (via the simulation capabilities of Simulink). The toolbox has been built around a generic non-linear aircraft model, which has a modular design that provides maximum flexibility to the user. The model has been configured for the DeHavilland DHC-2 Beaver aircraft, but can be adapted for many different kinds of airplanes if required. The aircraft model has been implemented as a Simulink block-diagram, which can be accessed both from the Matlab workspace and directly through the graphical user-interface of Simulink.

The toolbox contains a trimming utility that extracts steady-state flight conditions, and a linearization tool that determines linearized aircraft models for
user-specified operating points. These programs both illustrate how to access the flight dynamics from the Matlab workspace. Several open-loop and closed-loop simulation models illustrate how to apply the aircraft model for practical simulations within Simulink. As an example of the capabilities of this toolbox, a complete non-linear implementation of a 'classical' autopilot system for the Beaver aircraft is presented. The toolbox also contains wind and turbulence models, radio-navigation models, several other useful utilities, and on-line help.

Stefan Steinhaus, webmaster@steinhaus-net.de